The Dwyers
Melbourne - Early 1920s
However, after he married me (your grandmother - see photo at right) he turned to the milk industry, working for a Mr Haggart in Collingwood, Melbourne, and it wasn't long before he started out to make extra money by selling the skim milk and yodelling around the streets in the day time. He had several small dairies, one at Richmond, Melbourne (at the corner of Kent and Gardener Streets), then North Melbourne and also Footscray.
I got my sister Florence (Flo) down from the country to assist me and we did business from the dairy while Andy was out on his run. By degrees, as the business grew, we shifted and went to North Melbourne where he broke his skim milk run into a fresh milk run, then bought premises at Footscray (43 Droop St) as you had to have licensed premises. He bought a cottage dairy farm there for £800, and built a new dairy.
He called for tenders and a returned soldier from World war I built the dairy and it was a very nice place with rough grey stone and Andy had the wooden parts and doors painted pale blue which was one of his favourite colours. The grey stone and blue looked very smart.
Intersection of Kent & Gardner Sts, Richmond. Ethel's notes mention that Andrew had a dairy at this intersection, but doesn't say when, and doesn't say which corner it was on. This seemed to be the most promising of the four corners of the intersection when the picture was taken. The building seemed the right vintage, and there was an outbuilding on the property that could very likely have been stables back in the day. I guess we'll never know if this is the right building, unfortunately - one of the corners has a much more recent building which could have been built on the site of a demolished 1920's dairy. Photo by Phillip Dwyer April 1991.